How Corbyn Missed a Trick in His Conference Speech

Perhaps the stand-out moment of Jeremy Corbyn's conference speech was when he read out the words of Angela, who wrote to him recently: "My mentally ill daughter was told she would have to wait 12 months to get an appointment with an appropriate therapist. As a mother, I am at my wits end to know how to help her any more. I would hate her to become another suicide statistic."

Corbyn then pledged that Labour will deliver "real parity of esteem" for mental health services, somewhat more believably than when Theresa May talked about the same thing in June.

Moments of genuine empathy around relatable problems with straightforward solutions were peppered throughout a speech that cantered through a broad outlook of what Labour stands for under Corbyn: bashing the Tories, transforming the economy, pledging to recognise a Palestinian state and a decent line about Tory Brexiteers "daydreaming about a Britannia that both rules the waves and waives the rules".

He pledged that Labour would vote against Theresa May's Brexit plan in parliament, and said the party would press for a general election in the case of a no-deal Brexit. If she can't get a deal – which is increasingly likely – she should "make way for a party that can", he shouted.

Corbyn is using the crisis afflicting the Tory party to his advantage, but there’s a question over whether he's capitalising on other crises as best he could. He used the anniversary of the financial crash, ten years ago this month, to lay into "greed-is-good deregulated financial capitalism". Timid liberal politicians failed to use the financial crisis as a catalyst to change the system, and I couldn’t help but wonder if this speech will be looked back on with the same sense of missed opportunity.

Because while Corbyn offered progress on numerous fronts, there were areas where he could have used the discursive space opened up by recent social upheaval and political scandal to offer a radically different diagnosis of the problems affecting society – but he didn’t.

On climate change, for instance, he offered a "green jobs revolution" and a reduction of greenhouse gasses of 60 percent by 2030, and zero emissions by 2050. This is, on the one hand, welcome, and it’s good that someone is taking the possibility of us all drowning in the medium term somewhat seriously. But given the catastrophism that accompanied this summer’s numerous environmental terrors – deadly fires in Greece and elsewhere, parts of the Arctic Circle turning a disconcerting red on heat maps – you’d think people would be open to even more urgency on climate change than conventional politics might allow. That would probably involve a diagnosis of global warming as a product of a system that is already a social crisis for many currently, rather than some terror looming over the horizon. But the fact that we are, y'know, uh, all going to die, maybe provides an opportunity to push the envelope a bit more?

In the year of the Windrush scandal, Corbyn branded Theresa May’s "hostile environment" policies an example of a "nasty, cynical politics that demeans our country", and rightly blasted "the scandal of British citizens being deported, detained and left destitute". But wouldn’t it be great to have undermined the entire logic of state racism? He could have talked not just about British citizens who fall foul of its callous bureaucracy, but about the many who – for various reasons – get caught up in the net for not having the right papers. If it's nasty and cynical to deport British citizens, it shouldn't be OK for anyone else. This doesn’t have to be abstract. He could have spoken for his base by asserting, for instance, that doctors, nurses and university lecturers do not want to become border guards, policing the documents of people who turn up to hospitals and universities.

He was strong when highlighting the fact that "for too many people, social security has become a system of institutionalised bullying and degradation". He gave another heart-rending testimony from a man who has been put on antidepressants after seeing the cruelty inflicted on his wife, who has multiple sclerosis, by the benefits system. But then came a conflation of social security and welfare with increasing the number of police: "Labour is ready to put fairness and humanity back at the heart of our public services. And as Diane Abbott told us yesterday, you can’t keep people safe on the cheap."

That vision of safety was all about having border guards and cops, in a classic Corbynite conception of all arms of the state, whether or not that arm is implicated in oppressing people: having "more" versus the Tories' "less". Is it me, or is it a bit crappy to make the leap from treating benefits claimants better to putting 10,000 more police on the streets and adding more border guards with little in the way of assurance about the fairness or humanity of those police and border guards?

Maybe this is all a bit much to expect of the leader of the opposition. Perhaps my cynicism is getting the better of me. But the nature of parliamentary politics gives you an incentive to simply be less bad than the other guy. Corbyn has a far more convincing policy prospectus than the Tories, who offer nothing but the drama of civil war to a country that needs changing. That’s all he needs to do, really. But it is worth considering what somebody given the opportunity to speak to the nation might say if they didn’t feel compelled to merely frame it in terms of being better than the Tories – even if that means being quite a lot better than the Tories on a lot of issues – but, instead, in terms of meeting the numerous crises we face, in their own terms, head on.

@SimonChilds13